The World Taekwondo Federation caused much amusement over the weekend after announcing it was to change its name because of the ‘negative connotations’ of its acronym. It will now be known as the somewhat snappier World Taekwondo, Melanie Butler writes.

Three overseas-owned summer operations passed British Council inspections this summer, increasing the total of such organisations by over 10 per cent. All three previously traded as unaccredited schools, which under EU rules are unable to bring in students from outside the European Economic Area. The move to accreditation may have more to do with immigration rules than Brexit, as all inspection requests would have to have been made months before the UK referendum.

Just under 5 per cent of schools inspected by the British Council are owned wholly or partially by language travel agents, according to Council reports. On average, agent-owned schools are awarded 1.75 areas of strength, less than half the average for the accredited sector as a whole, though two – Magnifico Travel and Anglo, previously International Quest – are in the top 20 per cent, based on inspection reports. A further six agent-owned schools are accredited by ABLS, a third of the total in this scheme.

The two newly accredited agent-owned schools, Go-languages, owned by the Italian agency MLA, and Europartners, owned by Walter Beyer of Badd Wuennenberg, Germany, enrol almost entirely from their local markets, while Alpadia, owned by the Swiss course organisers of the same name, enrol largely from the EEA.

The British government may look to slash the number of international students to 170,000, nearly half the current enrolment, according the Guardian newspaper, in what’s seen as a purely political move to rig immigration numbers. The government has promised to reduce net migration, a measure which includes British citizens and international students.

A GROUND-BREAKING randomised control trial in four Madrid nurseries appears to show that children between eight months and three years old can acquire foreign L2 through hyper-stimulating interaction with a native-speaking teacher while improving their L1 and problem-solving skills. Emphasis on the use of native speakers, however, has caused controversy in Spain’s educational circles.

Fed up with lack of a government strategy for teaching English to adult migrants, teachers of Esol, as the subject is called in the UK, wrote their own – and took it to parliament. In their report the teachers’ association, Natecla, gave evidence of the benefits offered by the Esol strategies used in Wales and Scotland and argued for a similar plan for England.

Only 1,500 international students a year illegally overstay in the UK after their student visas have expired, according to government figures revealed by the Times newspaper today. The government had previously refused to release these new figures, which are based on exit checks at airports introduced last year. The figures are in stark contrast to those from the International Passenger Survey, relied upon by the current UK government, which show 90,000 students staying on illegally.

One in five of top managers lack the English skills to do their job, according to new research conducted by Cambridge English Language Assessment and QS university rankings. The research, based on a survey of 5373 employers in 88 countries, was launched in the EU Parliament on 27 September.